Balsam, the distro for the new KDE Spark tablet

[GreyGeek]

Yesterday I downloaded the 3.7Gb ISO for the i586 version of the Balsam Professional 12.1 distro which will be on the KDE Spark tablet, soon to be sold.

I am running it as a guest OS under VirtualBox 4.1.8 with guest additions installed. I gave it 16GB of virtual HD space and 128MB of video RAM, and 1.5GB of virtual RAM. With these parameters it runs very quickly. It ate 4.7GB of a 16GB vHD space.

It is based on a recent release of openSUSE and has been re-branded. It features KDE 4.7.2. Shortly after I fired it up yesterday I got an update notice, which went very smoothly. This afternoon, shortly after I fired it up, I got another notice of updates awaiting download and installation. They, too, went smoothly and then requested a reboot. I have just logged back on from the reboot and noticed yet another update waiting, this time for 76MB. I clicked the "Apply" button and was soon greeted with this message:

patchpenSUSE-2011-91-1.noarch conflicts with release-notes-openSUSE.noarch < 12.1.9-1.5.1 provided by release-notes-openSUSE-12.1.7-1.1.1.noarch<br>patchpenSUSE-2011-66-1.noarch conflicts with splashy-branding-openSUSE.i586 < 0.3.13-29.3.1 provided by splashy-branding-openSUSE-0.3.13-29.1.2.i586<br>patchpenSUSE-2011-9-1.noarch conflicts with MozillaFirefox-branding-openSUSE.i586 < 5.0-7.6.1 provided by MozillaFirefox-branding-openSUSE-5.0-7.3.1.i586

In all respects, except for the logo, splash screen and other graphics and other re-branding, this distro is openSUSE 12.1, released mid-November of 2011. The first and most SIGNIFICANT change is the offering of the btrfs instead of EXT4. I chose that FS for this install. Btrfs is very fast and from the video I saw on it yesterday it rivals ZFS. Some would say it's better. Other than that I have yet to notice a difference. Another is Snapper, a user-space utility to take, compare, and revert snapshots of files. Also included is includes Tumbleweed, a rolling update of tested, stable software. It is supposed to upgrade individual components as new stable releases are made available, which doesn't explain the error message I got above.

A good review of openSUSE 12.1 is here.

[bsniadajewski]

I was a fan of open/suse up through 11.3 since that was the first distro I could get my hands dirty and really check out Linux for once. It was almost always very stable and had a reasonable amount of software available in the official and non-official repos (Packman), and you could upgrade to the latest KDE or Firefox from the Factory repositories. The one big downside was the way you had to get the peoprietary Nvidia or AMD/ATI video drivers. At least you had a somewhat easy way through YAST/Community Repositories. I never tried Tumbleweed since I used the official Nvidia driver rather than nouveau and I didn't want to have to keep reinstalling the same driver after each kernel or driver update. Other than that, It was a good expereince with Suse, but Kubuntu (and by extension all other *buntus) is now my #1 distro.

[james147]

At least you had a somewhat easy way through YAST/Community Repositories.

I hated yast when i tried it, mostly because it kept overwriting changes I made manually in the configs :S.
Though it was a nice idea, but I don't like having stuff I did manually erased

[woodsmoke]

I installed Suse once on a machine that I gave away.

I didn't like it.

And that was when I had no preconceived notions; I was open to all ways of doing Linux.

The first time I did debian it just seemed "logical", don't know why, don't care.

Guess I'll wait on a purchase a while until there is a Debian distro that will halfway go on it.

woodsmoke

[bsniadajewski]

There was a way to fix that, I think, in YaST (go figure). I believe it was called "etc/config Settings" (correct me if I'm wrong. I haven't used OpenSuse in a while).

[GreyGeek]

SuSE 5.3 was my second distro, in Sept of 1998. I stayed with it and purchased 22 boxed sets. I was happy. SuSE had about 20 python scripts for configurations. They had a gui interface to a suseconfig.conf, YAST (Yet Another System Tool), in which users manipulated gui controls to change settings. (Initially YAST was a console app. I left just as its graphical version took over.) When the gui was closed it executed all twenty scripts regardless of how many changes, or where, you made. Slow. There was a setting that if you changed it to FALSE, the automatically configuration was canceled and YOU were responsible for all configs. I tried it once, but didn't know enough about Linux at the time and after I reinstalled I never touched it again.

Then, Novell bought SuSE and thought it could overwrite the GPL with such nonsense as "you are not allowed to make copies of this CD, nor install it on more than one computer. You can call <some gal's name> at XXX-XXX-XXXX to get a license to make backups of your installtion". I pointed out on the SuSE usenet that forcing that restriction on users was a violation of the GPL and as such prohibited Novell from further distributing SUSE (which is what they called SuSE). A firestorm errupted, and two camps formed, the Novell lawn jockys and those who supported the GPL. A guy by the name of "Mark" later posted a statement removing the reqirement, but I and many others had already switched to another distro, Mandrake for me.

I currently don't remember enough about openSUSE or the RPM to warrant jumping into a Konsole and doing the manual stuff that would fix the error that update tool is showing. But, Balsam (openSUSE) is very well polished, even if their update tool isn't as sharp.

[SteveRiley]

Yesterday I downloaded the 3.7Gb ISO for the i586 version of the Balsam Professional 12.1 distro which will be on the KDE Spark tablet, soon to be sold.

Hm, I wonder how well this might work on my Aspire 1420P tablet? I should give it a go, now that I've got this very slick ThinkPad X1 all set up. (BTW, this X1 is possibly the slickest notebook I have ever used.)

[GreyGeek]

Hm, I wonder how well this might work on my Aspire 1420P tablet? I should give it a go, now that I've got this very slick ThinkPad X1 all set up. (BTW, this X1 is possibly the slickest notebook I have ever used.)

Aaron writes:

Plasma Active is a joint project by the KDE community, basysKom and open-slx.
...
Plasma Active is easy to install, but you can also test drive it from a USB stick. There are different images of Plasma Active available: One Mer based image and one MeeGo based, both provided by basysKom and one running on Balsam provided by open-slx. You can find the software and installation instructions on the KDE Wiki.

In the last months Plasma Active achieved its goal to run cross-device and cross-platform. Plasma Active runs now on Intel x86 and ARM platforms, supporting more mobile devices like the WeTab/ExoPC, AdventVega, Point of View and Archos as well as N950. Read more information about all supported devices.

...

Plasma Active One is in Balsam, but the video of Spark running is showing Plasma Active Two, which is reported as being 10X faster than Plasma Active One, so it apparently Aaron Seigo and crew have updated Balsam to Plasma Active Two.

I have Balsam Pro 12.1 running as a guest OS under VB. It comes in either an i586 or x86_64 flavor, but both are 3.7GB downloads! It is a fork of openSUSE (even includes SUSE branding) and runs KDE 4.7.2. It's typically openSUSE, which features the YAST (Yet Another System Tool) and also includes System Settings. There is no doubt that openSUSE and Mandriva have the best GUI system tools for Linux, but typically Upstart automatically configures most peripherals so most of the time YAST like tools aren't necessary. But, Balsam (hence openSUSE) had no trouble automatically detecting and configuring hardware either. The Open-slx website has a button to change its language from German to English.

The Balsam download site is here. The link to download plasma-active-2.iso is what you want if you want to put Plasma-Active-Two on a tablet.

[SteveRiley]

Jerry, have you played any more with this? I'm thinking of giving it a go this afternoon.

[67GTA]

I haved bitched for three years about those nasty package conflicts. The devs like it that way. There are two sides to the argument. One side likes them the way they are so users can manually choose which versions of apps to update/keep. I personally like the Debian way of always using the highest version. The only conflicts you have is when there is a broken package/dependency which almost never happens unless you mix repos. This is one reason I always come back to Kubuntu.

[SteveRiley]

Well, here it is, Plasma Active Two from Balsam running on my Samsung 700T:



Boy do I feel like an amateur with SUSE, barely scratching my way through YAST2 to get the thing updated. Touch is broken. Sigh. And there's a lot of GNOME stuff on here, too.

[GreyGeek]

Jerry, have you played any more with this? I'm thinking of giving it a go this afternoon.

Not after I played with it as a guest OS using VB for an hour or so. I still have it as a guest if you want me to try anything.

[SteveRiley]

Does yours do anything at all? I can't get mine to function, even with a USB mouse plugged in. When the desktop starts, I see the background and a panel that looks fairly complete. Then the panel changes -- Network Manager disappears. I can tap a few things but I get the same behavior I saw before: it's as if one tap equals about a dozen rapid mouse clicks. About the only thing that's useful is switching to a console tty.

I still think it's mostly the hardware on this tablet. The kernel in Balsam is 3.1; I think it's missing the proper drivers for my touchscreen.